You Can Keep Studying White Working Class Voters, But We Know the Answers

In the current issue of the magazine incarnation of Tiger Beat On The Potomac can be found yet another anthropological study of People With Whom I Empathize But Do Not Understand. It's a fine piece of reporting and writing because it's by Mike Kruse, who's as good as it gets. However, again, I am baffled by the gaping chasms of cognitive dissonance from the people therein quoted, and I am again overwhelmed with dread over what's going to happen when these people realize they've been so completely played.

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This expedition takes us to eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania, and it features the kind of people who gave Donald Trump his margin of victory in the electoral college, and many of whom, quite sadly, seem to be resigned already to the fact that he's not going to be able to deliver on many of his more baroque promises. The steel jobs are not coming back. Coal is a dying industry, unless the people making billions on fracking can be convinced to trade us new earthquakes for old respiratory ailments. The opioid drug problem in places like Johnstown isn't going away even if you dig a 100-mile moat between Texas and Mexico and fill it with piranha and burning oil.

Dave Kirsch stood in the parking lot of Himmel's Coal Yard in Carrolltown, where he drives a truck, and expressed optimism and preached patience—not, though, that much patience. "My boss, he's a pretty smart man," Kirsch told me, "and he said it can't change overnight, but he said give it six months to a year." Maggie Frear, a retired nurse, told me toward the end of our meeting one evening in her home that the changes Trump pledged would "take him at least a couple months." A couple months? "Or probably even two years," she said. Four years tops, though, she assured me."If he doesn't do what he said he was going to do, in four years I won't vote for him," Frear said, holding open her screen door, as I stepped out into the dark and the cold of the winter on the way. "If he doesn't do what he said he was going to do, in four years he shouldn't even run."

What is there in Donald Trump's life and career that could make you think he could turn back the tide of deindustrialization next April, or even begin the process of doing so?

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In Trump's appearance at the War Memorial Arena on October 21, a rally that drew an estimated 4,000 people—in a place with a population of less than 20,000—he delivered a laser beam of an appeal to those desperate for some semblance of a return to better times. "The iron and steel forged in your mills formed the backbone of our nation … This was the town that people flocked to from around the world to make their American Dreams come true," he told them. "If we win," he said, "the change you've been waiting for will finally arrive. You must get out to vote. We will win. We will shock the world." Watch it now, and what happened on November 8 feels far less surprising.

Explain to me how what's being described here is not people indulging an addiction to the political opioids. There's no logic to it, no unifying principle.

For Schilling, the biggest reason she backed Trump was her son. Chad Schilling was 32 when he overdosed on a couch in his grandmother's house in the spring, a few weeks before the Pennsylvania primary. His mother tied his demise to that of the area overall. When I visited her one morning in Portage, she showed me newspaper clippings about his exploits as a high school football star, telling me he wasn't "book smart" for college but that all he wanted to do was work in the mines, like his grandfather. First he had to go to West Virginia. Then he got laid off in 2013. "He wanted a life I think he didn't think he could strive to get," she said. Sore knees from football led to pain pills, which led to heroin, which only got worse after he got let go. She found syringes and spoons stashed in the pockets of his old miner clothes. "This," Schilling said, "is why I hope our new president is going to make a change for us. We need a change. It's just been a nightmare." And when Trump talked about building the wall on the Mexican border, she told me, she didn't think about stopping people from coming into this country nearly as much as she thought about stopping the drugs. The heroin that killed her son. I heard the same sentiments from others about the drug scourge here, wrought by pervasive hopelessness. "People in this area have just had enough," Schilling said.

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This woman is asking for a kind of spiritual rebirth in our politics, and she's asking the likes of Donald Trump to provide it. The heroin that killed her son may have come from Mexico, but the pain pills that first sent him down the slide likely did not. The desperation in her voice is clear and tragic.The solution she is seeking is fantasy.

I asked Byich, who was wearing a hard hat and a Trump shirt, the same thing I had asked his boss. Does it make him uncomfortable that some of the supporters of the candidate he also supported are white supremacists? "It's America," he said. Meaning? "As long as you're not a violent person," he said, "it's freedom of speech, you know?" Freedom of speech? "I can take you out there," he said, nodding in the direction of the factory floor, "and introduce you to my black friends. I've called them the N-word, and they've called me the N-word. It's reality." He asked me if anybody had ever called me that. I'm 39 and white. I told him no. He seemed surprised. "You ever heard them on a rap song?" I was not expecting our conversation to have gone this way, and my facial expression must have suggested as much. Byich tried again. "Ever pick up a dictionary?" he said. "Read the definition of a N-word. It's an object that does work for another thing. Google it." So I Googled the word, and up onto my screen popped the definition: "Noun. Offensive. A contemptuous term for a black or dark-skinned person." I slid my phone across the table. Byich put on his industrial-strength safety glasses. "Really?" he said. "Are you serious?" He used his fingers to scroll. "I'll be damned," he said softly. "You know how many times you hear that? I mean, they use the N-word more than we do, black people. It doesn't offend me, and it doesn't offend my friends. My black friends. It's just goofing around."

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And we finally come to the nub of it. In the campaign just passed, racism and xenophobia and sexism were not "the only reasons" Trump won. That's stupid. There is genuine economic anxiety and despair in the country. But they were the accelerant. They might not have been the biggest reason why he won, but they damn sure were a big part of filling his rally halls and getting his voters to the polls, and not just in the South, either. All American populism falls into the trap of scapegoating The Other eventually; if it didn't, Bernie Sanders would be picking his Cabinet right now.

And I'm starting to get a kind of itchy feeling that anthropological surveys like this one are now serving the implicit purpose of camouflaging this basic fact on behalf of delicate souls who don't want to look the country squarely in the eye.

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I met with the local union president, Jeff Rininger, and the financial secretary, John Daloni. They both voted for Sanders in the primary and for Clinton last week. "I'm f--king depressed as hell," Rininger announced. "The members of our union are probably the ones who pushed it over the edge in favor of Trump," he said—and he was livid about it. Rininger, who's been the local union president since 1988, read to me passages of an email he had sent to his roughly 350 members, a message in which he chastised those who voted for Trump—he couldn't be sure how many of them there were—for going against not only his recommendation but what he saw as their own self-interest. Trump is a "union hater," he said in his email, and the Republicans "want to eliminate us." He predicted "tough times ahead for this union." "God help us persevere," Rininger had written.

Wait. What's this? Labor unions? What are those? If you're looking for the real damage that liberal "smugness" can do, don't look in the Humanities Department of your local small liberal-arts college. Look at the attitude that younger and/or more soi distant people in my age bracket have taken towards organized labor—from the tech industries to, yes, the teachers unions—over the past couple of decades.

Thousands of people, organized by what viable unions we have left, marched during the campaign for an increase in the minimum wage and for economic equality. Hell, in a couple of places, these people marched through the events of the campaign. For all the forelock-tugging about elitist reporters living in their bubble, the problem isn't simply that none of them worked in a steel mill. It's because, by not working in those jobs, they failed to understand the importance of organized labor as a counterweight to the money power. The feeling of being buffeted by anonymous economic and cultural forces is basically a feeling of loneliness. Unions used to be a bulwark against that feeling.

Rininger said he had heard back from one Trump-voting recipient of the email who had angrily responded to not tell him how to vote. Rininger saw him this week at work, he said. "I told him, 'F--k you. You hurt our union.'" But beyond flared tempers in the immediate aftermath of this ugly election, said Rininger and Daloni, the larger point is that this isn't going to work. There's next to no way, they believe, that Trump can deliver on his promises. "The infrastructure for the steel is all gone," Daloni said. "It just doesn't exist anymore in Johnstown. It did used to be a steel boomtown, but it was long before Obama was elected. It was decimated, really, before Bill Clinton was elected. The mills were going down in the '70s and '80s."

In October of 1980, when Donald Trump was preparing to open the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan, his first big dive into celebrity plutocracy, in one of my first big assignments for The Boston Phoenix, I took a road trip through Ohio and Michigan, stopping in Youngstown, Toledo, Flint, and Grand Rapids. What I saw there was clear evidence that the FDR coalition had gone to splinters. I remember spending time in a steelworkers hall in Youngstown, and I remember noticing that there were numbers chalked on all the desks and chairs and other furnishings. I asked somebody what the numbers were.

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